Customer relationship management (CRM) is all about managing the relationships you have with your customersâ€”including potential customers. CRM combines business processes, people, and technology to achieve this single goal: getting and keeping satisfied customers. It's an overall strategy to help you learn more about your customers and their behavior so you can develop stronger, lasting relationships that will benefit both you and your customers. Itâ€™s very hard to run a successful business without a strong focus on CRM. After all, itâ€™s all about the customer.

Successful CRM involves many different areas of your company, starting with sales, of course. But also various other customer-facing areas, like marketing and customer service.

CRM Solutions

CRM solutions help ensure that your sales, marketing, and support efforts are all working toward a common goal, so you can take your business success to a whole new level.

With CRM solutions from BrainSoft, youâ€™ll streamline and automate business processes, give everyone in your company a complete view of the customer, provide deeper analysis and insight into critical sales and customer metrics, and keep everyone focused on getting new customers while keeping the ones you already have happy.

CRM Solutions for Sales & Marketing. CRM helps you generate more leads, effectively market through multiple channels, optimize lead management, convert leads into customers, view all account-related information and activities, keep sales reps working productively, analyze your sales pipeline, and see whatâ€™s working and whatâ€™s not. An effective CRM solution helps you keep sales and marketing focused on filling the sales pipeline and generating more revenue rather than manually tracking sales leads.

CRM Solutions for Service & Support. CRM helps you collect customer support requests from all your channels, assign support cases to the appropriate agent or group of agents, leverage the best solutions to customer problems, escalate support cases when needed, help customers find solutions via your Web site, stick to the service-level agreements you have with your customers, and identify areas for service improvements. All that translates to better service and happier customers.

CRM Software vs. Web CRM

Traditional CRM software has been overtaken in recent years by Web CRM, also known as â€œonline CRMâ€, â€œhosted CRM, and â€œon-demand CRM.â€ Today, more companies than ever are turning to the Web, for business applications like CRM.

Why? Because to steer your company through these turbulent times, it's more important than ever to be on top of every lead, every opportunity, and every customer interaction. Without a big up-front software investment that's expensive to install and maintain.

Web CRM Promises Rapid Time to Value. Eliminating the need for a big up-front capital investment offers an immediate shortcut to CRM successâ€”and money in your pocket in the form of much quicker ROI than most CRM software.

Hosted CRM Makes Customization Much Easier. With online CRM solutions, basic customizations are easy, so even business users can make changes in minutes via a point-and-click interface.

On-Demand CRM Provides Unlimited Scalability. We uses a multitenant approach, so thereâ€™s no single instance of the software and you can scale your implementation fastâ€”without incurring high costs or waiting weeks or months.

Web CRM Features Painless Upgrades. Because deployments of new CRM features are virtually instantaneous, youâ€™re always on the latest version with web-based CRM systemsâ€”so upgrades are painless. Going through an upgrade of CRM is just like when your favorite consumer sites, like Web-based email or networking sites, upgradeâ€¦ all of your â€œstuffâ€ is there and working right away after the upgrade.

To Summarize:

On-Premise CRM Software. The outdated, client/server model for on-premise CRM software requires you to invest in an IT infrastructure, including networks and servers, to run the software. You also need to hire a team of IT professionals to install, deploy, and maintain the software as the vendor makes enhancements to features or functionality.

Web CRM Solutions. Web-based CRM, hosted CRM, on-demand CRM, software-as-a-service (SaaS) CRM, or cloud computing CRMâ€”all these terms refer to the same thing: a new model for delivering CRM over the Internet.